Monday Night Football Recap: The Depression Bowl

Last night it looked like a job, playing ball for a living. Thereupon, two teams without much to play for, the Panthers and the Eagles, met. Two teams unable to mount much of a storyline, except a tip towards a betting line on which head coach will be fired first. Both seem a good bet still. The Panthers' Ron Rivera, who looks as much like an ex-stunt man/Tony-Danza-body-double than he does NFL coach, seems more than willing to go back to being a defensive coordinator, according to Jon Gruden. And Andy Reid of the Eagles, who in the murmuring light of bad luck and bad decision-making, has become what we always thought he might be: the mute and storming, miraculously short-legged sex-product of Cookie Monster and Oscar the Grouch, all packed into a tracksuit. If they don't stamp his parole card soon, he's gonna jump the fence, barbed wire and all.

The game itself? I'm happy to report that it went off without a hitch, without a single replay challenge, without so much as a sideline shot of one shaven cheerleader. The Panthers thrust into a lead, with two identical post patterns, as poorly covered by the Eagles "professionals" as those run in the local Saturday morning church league flag football Round Robin, especially in the first few moments before Jeremy-who-walked-on-at-Clemson pulls up in his Town and Country with that tray of lattes for his defensive backfield. Two receivers, wide open, so painfully wide open that the generally epic booing the Philadelphia crowd delivers to quitters like their safeties, their cornerbacks, and their preening linebacker corps in such moments seemed a mellow, understated effort, almost an offer of comfort from the once legendary savages of the old Veterans Stadium. No batteries thrown. No beers dumped. I didn't even see one set of thumbs down from the usually Caesarian Philly fan base. Mostly they were cheering, when the Eagles strung together first downs on the way to one red zone stall-out or another. I used to really enjoy a nasty crowd. Philadelphia doesn't seem to have the stomach for it anymore.

Make no mistake. They played. People cheered. The gestures were in place. Panthers quarterback Cam Newton, who grew gradually less accurate with his throws as the quarters marched on, gesticulated like a high-schooler on YouTube every time he thumped forward for a first down. Newton plays like a huge video game avatar of himself. I'm not sure whether we're supposed to be excited, or pissed that someone's little brother snuck into Newton's player settings to turn his agility up to 99 percent while sliding his personality into the range Yul Brynner displayed as the robot in Westworld. On the other "side," as these things are sometimes cadged, Philly featured an exciting running game, which — true to form under Reid — they shut down at the first sign of imminent scoring. Oddly, no one at ESPN seemed to know who the Eagles' quarterback was. Nick Cage, or somebody. Poor guy got no coverage, no back-story, no face-time. Gruden spent more time getting yucks by comparing his team-assigned Buick LeSabre to the ones driven by the great Mount Olympus of '90s NFL coaching twerps: Andy Reid, Mike Holmgren, and Steve Mariucci when the four of them coached together in who-the-hell-remembers-two-decades-ago-anyway? Better still, he avoided the key question: What kind of a douchebag takes (and holds onto) pictures of the sedans assigned to his direct supervisors, only to broadcast them on national TV as if it were all a matter of public record?

In the end, the Panthers won, because they forced three timely fumbles out of rookie running backs for the injury-riddled Eagles. Good running backs, too, who seemed to forget the one phrase every coach has yelled in their earhole for 80 percent of their lives up to now: Hold on to it. They ran well; they simply disconnected when it mattered. It was, in fact, a game played on disconnect, in a disconnected stadium, eyeballed by a disconnected crowd. Had they been so forward-thinking, the ESPN league minions might have dubbed it the Depression Bowl. You know, the economy. Or whatever. Or just a state-of-mind thing, this meeting of the beleaguered, on a dark night on the East Coast. Sad. The teams, the players, the fans, the audience, and most of all the coaches. They have it worst. Everything rides with them. And you know, Reid and Rivera still drive the LeSabre.

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